May 2005
Intermediate to advanced
576 pages
13h 46m
English
By Steve Best
Linux provides several utilities for each type of file system for looking at file system metadata and analyzing on-disk structures. With these tools, you can view a file system's structures. Generally, these tools are intended for use by developers of a file system to analyze structures; however, they can also be used to find performance problems.
In this case study, we'll provide examples of viewing an inode on Ext2, JFS, ReiserFS, and XFS file systems. Next, we'll show how to tune each type of file system by using an external log. An external log improves performance because the log updates are saved to a different partition than the corresponding file system. This reduces ...